[Python-Dev] PEP 3003 - Python Language Moratorium

[Guido van Rossum]

On Fri, Nov 6, 2009 at 3:24 PM, Georg Brandl <g.brandl at gmx.net> wrote:
> Guido van Rossum schrieb:
>
>> Actually, I think Dirkjan has a point. I'm not sure that we need
>> another moratorium (that's a rather dramatic kind of decision which
>> should be very rare indeed) but I do agree that deprecations are often
>> more of a pain than they're worth.
>>
>> For example, take the deprecation of the md5 and sha modules in Python
>> 2.6. They make it a bit of a pain to write code that *cleanly*
>> supports Python 2.4 (doesn't have hashlib) through 2.6 (warns when
>> importing md5 instead of hashlib). You can silence the warning, but
>> that is in itself not particularly clean, and users really hate having
>> the warnings.
>
> Trying to import hashlib and importing md5 on ImportError isn't *too* unclean,
> is it?

That's not all -- you also have to modify the code that uses the
module, unless you use "import as", which has problems of its own.
Plus, I may not care (yet) about supporting 2.7, and yet I am forced
to change my code to cleanly support 2.6. I really don't like it.

-- 
--Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)